The High Return to Private Schooling in a Low-Income Country- Working Paper 279

Tessa Bold
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Mwangi Samson Kimenyi, Justin Sandefur and Tessa Bold

No 279, Working Papers from Center for Global Development

Abstract: Existing studies from the United States, Latin America, and Asia provide scant evidence that private schools dramatically improve academic performance relative to public schools. Using data from Kenya—a poor country with weak public institutions—we find a large effect of private schooling on test scores, equivalent to one full standard deviation. This finding is robust to endogenous sorting of more able pupils into private schools. The magnitude of the effect dwarfs the impact of any rigorously tested intervention to raise performance within public schools. Furthermore, nearly two-thirds of private schools operate at lower cost than the median government school.

Pages: 10 pages
Date: 2011-12
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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